STAGE REVIEW : ALL ODDS, NO EVENS AT THE ‘BALL’

‘I don’t think of my characters as eccentric or wacky,” playwright Beth Henley says in the current edition of South Coast Repertory’s Subscriber magazine. “I think they’re vivid.”

Vivid: as in colors. But too many bright colors can weary the eye. Similarly, a play where every character seems to be doing his or her damnedest to behave like a “character” can be a strain. Halfway through Henley’s “The Debutante Ball” at SCR, you begin to wish that someone dull would walk on--a touch of gray to set off all that orange and pink.

I’d had hopes for Violet the maid (Penny Johnson). She looked sensible, and not at all in sympathy with the florid acting-out that her vulgar white employers were allowing themselves. (“The Debutante Ball” is set in Henley country, a mansion in Hattiesburg, Miss.)

Alas, when Violet told us her story--it’s the kind of play where everyone gets at least one such aria--it concerned her wish to go off to Hollywood and learn to become a “a funny clown person.” When she put on a red nose, it was clear that Violet, too, was one of the vivid.

Needless to say, this is not the story of her coming-out party. The debutante in question is a 20-year-old waif (Ann Hearn), who has not been absolutely right in the head since her mother brained her father with a skillet some years back, which landed the mother in jail. It didn’t help, either, when the daughter’s chihuahua was crushed to death by a rolling watermelon.

The deb party is supposed to return the young woman’s confidence, while also reinstating her mother (Joanna Miles) to the social swim in Hattiesburg. (A practical woman, she had married her slick defense lawyer--Kurtwood Smith--and this has not gone down too well in town. People in the South can be so narrow.)

The deb party also brings together relatives on all sides of this new family. There is Mother’s giddy/sad oldest daughter (Diane Salinger), who takes pills and talks like Blanche Dubois: “Come on now, we must be gay and frivolous tonight and spin ourselves into a high, high fever.”

There’s the lawyer’s sullen son (Jeffrey Combs), a would-be playwright who humps around on a crutch like Richard III--it seems he was mugged by two old ladies in New York. There’s the lawyer’s deaf niece (Phyllis Frelich) and the mother’s gay, brother (Laurence O’Dwyer).

As might be guessed, the debutante party (which we don’t actually see, on the not-always-accurate premise that this sort of thing is funnier described) turns out to be a total disaster. But it does get everyone down to the nitty-gritty of revealing what’s really bothering them--in other words, more arias.

All passion spent for the night, the characters then fall into reconciliations and new romantic partnerships that might turn out to have staying power but that, given this family’s emotional constancy, might also fall apart by next Tuesday. For the moment, though, the ending is hopeful, in a Chekhovian sort of way.

If it all sounds halfway entertaining, the audience at South Coast the other night certainly found it so. Their laughter, however, was not that of recognition. Henley’s characters were funny (when they were) because they were so bizarre, so extreme--not because they behaved like you, me or Uncle Harry.

Surely that’s what Henley is getting at: that, down deep, nobody is “normal”--everybody has his devils. Her folks are just in closer touch with theirs. So in touch, in this play, that they wear you out, in somewhat the same way that a visit to a ward of hebephrenic mental patients would.

Director Stephen Tobolowsky hasn’t provided any resistance to this tendency in the play. He’s gotten splendid performances from the cast, both as individuals and as an ensemble. Not only do they believe in these tortured people, they take their part--Salinger as the pill-popping Bliss, Miles as the tough Mother, Hearn as the petrified deb.

But the pace starts high and goes higher, with a sense of strain behind it all, almost as if we can feel our playwright racking her brain for the next black, zany moment. We’re fatigued--or at least I was--long before the play turns inward and people start to listen.

The physical production is splendid, particularly Robert Blackman’s costumes. (“Vivid” would certainly apply to the mother’s bottle-green dress for the ball, which poor Bliss can’t quite match.) Mark Donnelly’s set has the gross rococo exhibitionism of a nouveau-riche Southern mansion, too, but the daubs of white paint on the stairs is a joke that doesn’t read.

‘THE DEBUTANTE BALL’ Beth Henley’s play at South Coast Repertory. Director Stephen Tobolowsky. Setting Mark Donnelly. Costumes Robert Blackman. Lighting Tom Ruzika. Production manager Paul Hammond. Dramaturg Jerry Patch. Stage manager Julie Haber. With Penny Johnson, Ann Hearn, Jeffrey Combs, Kurtwood Smith, Diane Salinger, Laurence O’Dwyer, Joanna Miles, Phyllis Frelich. Plays Tuesday-Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 7:30 p.m., with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2:30 p.m. Tickets $14-$20. Closes May 12. 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, (714) 957-4033.